The Ring on Her Finger (13 page)

“Well, kiddo,” he said, “I’d say whether you go to the reading place or not next week is up to you and your folks and your teachers.”

“And Rosemary,” Abby quickly added.

“Yeah, I guess Rosemary, too,” Max relented. She was, after all, Abby’s primary caregiver. Not to mention the only one who seemed to really give a damn about the kid. “Still, if you need any help with—”

“I don’t need help,” Abby cut him off. “I just don’t like reading, that’s all.”

“Fine,” Max said. “I’m not that big a reader myself. But if you’re having trouble—”

“I’m not having trouble,” she interrupted him again, more tartly this time. Then, adamantly, she repeated, “I just...don’t...like... reading. That’s all.”

“Okay, whatever you say, Abby.” Max blew out an errant breath of air, then turned to lower the hood on the silver Gullwing. It settled into place with a contented thunk, and he spun around to face the little girl fully. “But if you do...”

“I
don’t
.”

“Fine.”

Abby slammed the box of cookies down on the desk with enough force to send crumbs flying from the top.

“Look, Abby...” Max tried again.

Before he could finish what he was going to say—not that he really knew what he was going to say—the little girl jumped down from the chair and went whizzing out the open carriage house door, nearly knocking down Lucy French in the process.

“Abby!” the housekeeper called after her. “Rosemary is looking for you!”

“Don’t worry,” Max said, making her turn back to face him. “That’s where she’s headed now.”

But it wasn’t the fleeing Abby who was foremost in his thoughts at that moment. It was Lucy, who somehow managed to look prettier every time he saw her.

He’d about had a heart attack four nights ago when he went to meet her after her class and got an eyeful of her in that black miniskirt and red, red top that had demanded he do something to her he’d been wanting to do since the day she arrived at Harborcourt. A gag gift from a friend, she’d said. Funny friend, giving him a heart attack like that. Not to mention the equivalent of a libido wedgie. Ha ha ha. Yeah, pretty damned funny.

He remembered speeding through the city that night while driving her home, the first time he’d gone above the legal speed limit—hell, the first time he’d broken any rule—in five years. He hadn’t been able to help himself. Something inside him had just gone a little wild that night. Seeing Lucy looking the way she did, knowing he could never have her, it had rousted something inside him he thought he’d tamped down for good—a thirst for danger, a violent streak, an uncontrollable urge, an irresistible force, a death wish, whatever you wanted to call it. All those things the racing magazines had said about him before. All those things that had been a part of his previous life.

Until Monday night, he thought he’d exorcised them all from his system, thought he’d succeeded in making a new man of himself. But he realized in that brief moment of speeding through downtown that he hadn’t changed at all. Five years of starving himself and staving off the world, of asceticism and austerity, of denial and discipline, and he was exactly the same man he was before. He was still no good. He was still dangerous to anybody who got too close.

Lucy, though, looked different today than she had that night. At first Max couldn’t put his finger on why. Her chin-length, caramel-colored hair was still soft and silky, still beckoned for his touch, still offered a really nice view of her really nice neck. Her eyes were still wide and blue and candid, her mouth was still full and ripe and luscious...and succulent...and sexy...and arousing and...and...and...

Where was he? Oh, yeah. Her mouth was still really nice, too. But there was something different about her—he just couldn’t say what. Then she stepped into a wide rectangle of sunlight that splashed through the window...and through her dress, too, outlining those gorgeous gams he usually saw in the flesh—literally. That was when it hit him, while he was looking through Lucy’s dress—instead of up it. It was the dress itself. It concealed instead of revealed, covering her to mid-calf in a loose-fitting pastel instead of a blinding, skintight, microscopic scrap of fabric. Oddly, her new look was infinitely more appealing than the old one. Because the old one hadn’t seemed real on her, hadn’t looked genuine, hadn’t felt right. This one, however, felt...

Oh, man. It felt good. Too damned good.

“How do you know she’s headed for Rosemary?” Lucy asked, oblivious to his perusal.

“She always runs to Rosemary when she’s upset,” Max said, forcing his gaze to her face instead of letting it rove hungrily over her body, as it really wanted to do.

Not that looking at her face didn’t make him hungry, too. In fact, looking at her face made him want things even worse than looking at her body did. Because even though her body promised untold sexual satisfaction, that wasn’t enough to get a man through life. Lucy’s face, her expressions, her eyes... Those gave him a glimpse of the woman beneath the beautiful shell. Max saw a lot of things he liked in Lucy’s face. So he made himself look away, focusing on a table behind her that was piled with dirty, broken auto parts that were much more in keeping with his character.

“What’s she upset about?” Lucy asked.

“School. Parents. Me. Life. Pick one.”

“Why’s she mad at you?”

Funny how she didn’t question Abby being mad at all those other things, as if she could easily understand why a little girl would be unhappy with them. Or maybe that wasn’t so funny after all. Just what was Lucy French’s story anyway?

“I don’t know. Abby gets mad a lot. She’s eight. She’s entitled.”

Lucy nodded, as if she understood that, too. “Rosemary figured she wandered out here to visit you.” She smiled, and the gesture had the same effect on Max that a good, solid blow to the back of the head would have. “She says Abby has a crush on you.”

Max laughed that off. “Nah. She just doesn’t have that many people to talk to. And being an only child, she responds better to adults than other kids.”

“You talk like you speak from experience.”

He shrugged and told himself not to say anything. Then he heard himself reply, “Maybe I do.”

“You don’t have any brothers or sisters?”

He shook his head. “Always wished I did, though. You?”

“I have a brother and a sister. Interestingly, I always wished I was an only child.”

He chuckled at that and felt some of the tension in his body ease. “You don’t have class tonight?” he asked, because... Well, just because.

“No. Thank goodness.”

“But school just started. You can’t already be tired of it.”

“I just... I don’t know what I was thinking to agree to go back to school, that’s all.”

That was an interesting way to put it, that she’d agreed to go back to school. “How long since you graduated?”

A strange look crossed her face when he asked the question, but she recovered quickly. “A few years.”

“What have you been doing in the meantime?”

She glanced down at the question, smoothing her hand over a nonexistent wrinkle on her dress. “Ah... I, um...I sort of worked in the publishing business.”

Appropriate enough for an English major. “Editing books?”

She continued to look down, now examining the nonexistent manicure on her fingernails. “Actually... I, um...I wasn’t so much editing books as I was, uh...driving them.”

Hey, how about that? Something else that they had in common. Well, sort of. She’d probably never driven books at three-digit speeds. Not unless she was in a real hurry to deliver them to their destination.

“I didn’t know you could drive books,” he said. “Stick or automatic? What kind of speed can you get on one of those things?”

She glanced back up at that, looking puzzled for a moment. Then she laughed lightly, and something inside Max crackled and fizzed...and damned if he didn’t like the sensation a lot. He would have sworn crackling and fizzing was unmanly, but Lucy put it right up there with rugby in the mud.

“I didn’t drive them” she said with mock impatience. “I drove them to where they needed to go.”

“Ah. Gotcha. Well, there you go. Another thing the two of us could talk about. Our lives as drivers.”

Dammit, why did he say that? As far as Lucy was concerned, he’d only ever taken care of cars. He didn’t need her asking about his life driving them.

She seemed in no way curious about his response, though, evidently concluding he was referring to his position as the Coves’ part-time chauffeur. Which was the one aspect of his job he hated. It had been Alexis’s idea that he should, as part of his employment, dress from time to time in full livery and drive her and Justin to formal affairs. She really got off on the uniformed chauffeur thing, because so few Louisville families actually practiced such an indulgence. But Max had always figured that it added to his humiliation and disgrace, so he agreed to do it.

Lucy’s gaze skittered over to the Duesenberg, and she eyed it with frank admiration. “I’ve certainly never driven anything like that.” She sighed with much affection. “It’s beautiful.”

Damn. Just what he needed. For pretty Lucy French to have as big an admiration for car flesh as he did. He told himself to change the subject. Instead, he asked, “You wanna sit in it?”

Her eyes went wide with alarm. “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I couldn’t. I’d...break something. You don’t want me to get close to that car, trust me.”

“Oh, come on. You won’t break anything. This baby was put together back when cars were built like oil tankers. A wrecking ball couldn’t break that thing.”

She eyed the vehicle again, obviously wanting very badly to take him up on his offer. So Max strode over to the dove gray car and opened the driver’s side door. “Come on,” he repeated. “You know you want to. It’s just sitting, Lucy. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”

She bit her lip thoughtfully, then, with clear reluctance, shook her head. She smiled and said, very softly, “Not the front seat. Maybe the back?”

He thought it odd that she’d prefer the back to the driver’s seat, but what did he know? He closed the driver’s side door and reached for the one in back instead, opening it wide. Then he swept his hand toward the interior. “Your chariot awaits.”

For a moment, Lucy only stood silent, gazing first at Max, then at the Duesenberg, then at him, her expression now almost...

Uh-oh.

No way. He had to be imagining what she seemed to be thinking. She couldn’t possibly be looking at him as if she wanted him to join her in the car. On the broad backseat. Horizontal. Naked. He really had gone too long without sex. Unnaturally long. Maybe he ought to modify that part of his penance. Hey, there was a thought. Maybe he’d been too hard on himself to make himself give up every pleasure known to man. Maybe he could allow himself one pleasure. It really wasn’t natural to expect a man to give up sex completely. Especially when he still had a good fifty years left in his body.

And it was that kind of thinking, that kind of justification of unacceptable behavior, that had gotten him into this situation to begin with. Not that having sex with a beautiful woman in the backseat of a beautiful car was unacceptable. Not normally. Not for most guys. But for Max, it wasn’t allowed. He wasn’t even allowed some quick, meaningless coupling with a woman he’d never see again. He for sure wasn’t allowed a leisurely, enormously satisfying union with Lucy in the backseat of a classic car.

She took a step forward, the glide of her dress skimming over her legs, whose silhouette he could still see in the sunlight. Then she took another step that brought her out of the light and into the shadows, and she somehow seemed more approachable then. A half dozen more steps brought her next to the Duesenberg, close enough for Max to touch her. He tightened his grip on the car door so he wouldn’t act on that impulse, but she placed her hand next to his on the door, brushing her fingers lightly over his. Even that simple contact nearly undid him. But there was worse to come, because when Lucy settled her foot on the car’s running board, she pulled up the skirt of her dress to see what she was doing, giving Max a peek of the creamy flesh beneath.

He had no idea why the sight of her leg was so erotic now, when under her miniskirts, it had only been... Well, okay, it had been erotic then, too. But not like this. As he watched her tug the delicate fabric of her dress over her calf, then her knee, something inside him just...snapped. He released the door and moved his hand toward her shoulder, stopping himself just before he would have actually touched her. Had he done that, had he so much as curled his fingers over her shoulder, he wouldn’t have been able to stop, would have had to touch more of her, would have pulled her close and done things to her until neither of them would have been able to tell who was who or what was what.

Instead, he glided just the tips of his fingers over her short sleeve, stopping at the precise moment when his fingertips would have left cool fabric and gone to warm skin. But even then, he knew he had to touch her. He just couldn’t help himself. With great indolence and even greater care, he moved his hand lower, cupping her elbow in his palm, telling himself it was only because he wanted to do the gentlemanly thing and help her into the car.

When she glanced up to acknowledge the gesture, Max knew he was a big fat liar. He was no gentleman. He’d done what he had because he wanted to touch Lucy. Because he had to touch her. He really had thought that that would be enough. Now that he felt the soft glide of her skin beneath his fingers, however, he wondered if he would ever have enough of Lucy French.

“Watch it,” he said as she bent to enter the car. “Be careful.”

But it wasn’t the car’s low ceiling he was warning her about. Hell, he wasn’t even sure it was Lucy he was trying to warn. He may have been talking to himself.

Just as she was bending to fold herself into the car—and just as Max was thinking it was going to be inescapable that he follow her into it and lay her across the wide backseat, and cover her mouth with his, and move a hand to the hem of her dress to lift it over her knees, her thighs, her hips, all of her, and then cover her breast with his hand and the rest of her with his body—just as he was thinking about all that, the scramble and squeak of Power Puff Girl sneakers erupted behind him, and he turned to find Abby and Rosemary standing at the carriage house door.